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Editor’s note: Below is the transcript to the panel discussion, “The Genocidal Axis,” which took place at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. Restoration Weekend was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Erick Stakelbeck: I just want to say a few words about why we’re here today. And we talk about the Genocidal Axis.

To me, the two pillars of that axis are the global Muslim Brotherhood movement and the Iranian regime.

Robert Spencer: That’s correct.

Erick Stakelbeck: And we’ve talked about the Muslim Brotherhood. I just wrote a book about the Brotherhood. And in my research — look, I knew these were bad guys. This is the granddaddy of all Islamic terrorist groups. In the modern era, it spawned from the Muslim Brotherhood. Our good friends, the moderates, as the Obama Administration tells us, spawned al-Qaeda, created Hamas.

Without the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood way back in 1928 in Egypt, 9/11 would’ve never happened. Everyone behind that attack, from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri — before they formed al-Qaeda, they belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the gateway drug to Islamic terrorism.

They’re also the gateway drug, in this era, to Islamic anti-Semitism. And we talk about the Genocidal Axis. We talk about the efforts of jihadists to wipe Christians and Jews from the face of the planet. In writing my book — again, I knew these were bad guys. This is the granddaddy, the Brotherhood — but the depths of their anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic ideology shocked even me, to a degree.

In 1933 — you may be shocked to learn this — there were some 80,000 Jews living in Egypt, mainly in Cairo and Alexandria. Always, as Robert could tell you, under dhimmi status, but they were there. Eighty thousand Jews. There were even anti-Hitler rallies in 1933 in Cairo.

Then, along came the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928, gradually gained strength throughout the 1930s, and established a working relationship, folks, with the Nazis. The Muslim Brotherhood worked hand-in-glove with Hitler’s war machine to extend the Final Solution from the Jews of Europe to the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.

So by 1937, 1938, just five years after those anti-Nazi rallies in Egypt, we have synagogues being burnt to the ground. We have pogroms against the Jews of Egypt, spurred by the Muslim Brotherhood, using Nazi literature and Nazi propaganda.

By 1948, as the State of Israel in my view was being miraculously reborn, we had legions of Arab armies closing in on the fledgling Jewish state. The Muslim Brotherhood sent battalions to assist in the invasion of Israel.

This is who they are. We should not be surprised when, a few months ago, the not-so-dearly departed Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, was captured on video tape calling Jews the sons of apes and pigs. And as Robert will tell you, there was some theological ammo, to say the least, behind that statement.

There can never be peace with Israel or, as they call it, Palestine. I’ve interviewed Muslim Brotherhood operatives face-to-face. I’ve been in their offices, their mosques, their homes. One thing that galvanizes them more than any other issue is a hatred of the Jewish people. The word “Israel” does not exist in their lexicon. It is only “the Zionist entity.”

And I have to say these people look like you and I. They wear suits and ties, they speak — they’re very charming. They speak fluent English, they’re Western-educated — designer suits. This is the Brotherhood strategy. Stealth. And it works.

What we have right now, ladies and gentlemen, playing out in the Middle East, in real time, before your very eyes, is the old adage in the world of jihad and Islamism. First, the Saturday people. Then, the Sunday people.

Look, the Saturday people have been emptied, the Jewish people have been emptied, from the nations of the Middle East and North Africa. One million Jewish refugees fled countries like Iran, Yemen, Morocco, Libya in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. Sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. One million Jewish refugees.

Number one, where is their right of return?

(Applause)

Not that they’d want it.

(Laughter)

Number two, we’re seeing this scenario played out again, folks. Christians right now, in places like Egypt. Churches are being burnt to the ground. In August, there were 70 to 80 churches, according to some estimates, burnt to the ground by the Muslim Brotherhood and its minions in Egypt. Sometimes with worshippers inside, in places like Nigeria. We’re seeing this repeat itself across the Muslim world.

First came the Saturday people. Now the bull’s eye is on the backs of every Christian, every Sunday person, in the Middle East and North Africa.

(Applause)

This is who they are. You cannot negotiate with these people. Dialogue and diplomacy do not work. On the Sunni side, you have the Brotherhood; on the Shia side, you have Iran and Hezbollah. It’s not a coincidence that Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah — who’s probably hiding in an underground bunker as we speak right now, hiding from the IDF — he was quoted a few years ago as saying — it’s good that the Jews have gathered in one nation, the land of Israel. Because that’ll save us the trouble of pursuing them around the world and killing them. They’re all in one place, this is great.

This is the mindset of this regime. Nasrallah is an acolyte of the Iranian regime, an appendage of the Iranian regime. This is who we want to strike a grand bargain with, folks, and allow to have nuclear weapons. What a comforting thought, especially for Israel.

You have Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, who wrote a book a few years ago, in 2003, saying the war is not just between Israel and the Arab nations; it’s between every Jew and every Muslim. Folks, the goal is not just the liquidation of the Jewish state; it’s the liquidation of the Jewish people.

Just over a week since an American university severed ties with the Hamas-linked Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, after pictures emerged showing a Nazi-style on-campus rally by Islamic Jihad in November, further evidence of fascist-style events at the flagship Palestinian Arab institution has emerged.

Video footage, posted by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), shows clips from two separate rallies at Al-Quds University, in which Islamic Jihad members, cheered on by other students, take part in a live performance at which they brandish imitation assault rifles and black Islamist flags, and give Nazi salutes.

The live “show” features terrorists killing Israeli soldiers and executing a “collaborator”, who is denounced as a “traitor” and a “spy”, and suggests that the initial pictures, which were first released by British journalist Tom Gross, were not from a one-off incident but evidence of a much wider phenomenon.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Tom Gross said that the footage proved that attempts by Al-Quds to excuse the November 5th rally as an isolated event were disingenuous:

“The emergence of a video showing another Fascistic-style, militaristic Islamic Jihad rally, on what appears to be the main campus of Al-Quds University this past May – together with Palestinian students at Al-Quds who have informed me that the student factions of both Hamas and the PFLP held similar rallies at Al-Quds University this semester a few weeks ago – calls into question the claims by the Al-Quds university authorities that the November 5 rally was a one-off event, which they claim they didn’t know about until they saw the photos of it.”

Many Israelis point to the lionization of Nazi and other anti-Semitic figures as a reason to doubt the sincerity of the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to any future peace agreement.

The use of Nazi symbols is worryingly common, although tends to go unnoticed by many mainstream media outlets.

Just this past October, for example, Jewish motorists were horrified to see a Nazi flag flying over a major thoroughfair near the Arab town of Beit Umar. The flag had apparently been placed there by residents of the town, located near Hevron.

That incident was in fact the second occasion in which Beit Umar residents had flown a Nazi flag over the same highway, in an apparent “gesture” to their Jewish neighbors.

Later that same month, a youth magazine linked to the Palestinian Authority published a list of “famous quotes” from none other than Adolf Hitler, aimed at glorifying the Nazi leader.

Link between “Palestinian nationalism”, Nazism?

Apart from the frequency with which such instances occur, some have pointed to the role of prominent Palestinian Arab and Muslim leaders promoting anti-Semitism and encouraging the use of Nazi symbols specifically to goad Jews.

For example, during a 2009 interview with a London-based Arabic language TV station, the head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Ra’ed Salah, remenisced fondly about how his class once drew a swastika on the classroom blackboard to provoke their Jewish teacher.

More famous is the case of the infamously anti-Semitic Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini.

In October, reacting to ongoing incidents of incitement and anti-Semitism by the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used a keynote speech at Bar Ilan University to point to a deep link between the Palestinian national movement and Germany’s Nazi regime.

Netanyahu noted that Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the founder of “Palestinian nationalism”, was an admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler, had met the Nazi Fuhrer on numerous occasions and was actively involved in encouraging Hitler and his henchmen in their project of annihilating the Jewish people.

Far from playing a “minor role” in the Holocaust, as some have claimed, the Mufti played an “important” part in ordering the extermination of Jews and “was directly involved in The Final Solution”, Netanyahu said.

Back in January, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – whose organization is currently involved in US-brokered “peace talks” with Israel –hailed the Muft as a “hero”, whose ways should be emulated. The transcript of that speech – made at a Fatah party rally – was also translated by MEMRI though it garnered very little mention from the majority of international media outlets.

Zero-sum politics

But according to Middle East expert Dr. Mordechai Kedar, the issue extends further still. Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Kedar asserts that adopting of the trappings of the ultimate enemy of the Jewish people – Nazism – is simply a manifestation of a zero-sum way in which politics and conflict is pursued in the Middle East at large.

“Unfortunately there are people in the United States of America and elsewhere, Jews and non-Jews alike – usually liberal, open-minded people – who think that the Middle East acts according to American rules, and that views and approaches which can work in America can work in the Middle East.

“These people fail to understand that the Middle East works according to totally different rules, because the mindset of people in this region is different.

“In America people think that every struggle, every dispute, has some kind of solution. In the Middle East, what prevails is the belief that a struggle finishes when one of the sides ceases to exist. This is the end of a conflict,” he explained.

A daylong Georgetown University conference on Egypt’s political state in the wake of July’s ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was to include a member of Egypt’s Nazi Party.

Hosted and organized by the school’s Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Center for Christian Muslim Understanding, the Dec. 5 program is entitled “Egypt and the Struggle for Democracy.” The lone Coptic Christian invited, Ramy Jan, is part of Egypt’s small Nazi Party and sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, theWashington Free Beaconreports.

Jan is listed representing “Christians Against the Coup” in a promotional flier for the event posted by Georgetown Tuesday morning. He is omitted from an updated flierposted six hours later. In between the two, Jan’s Nazi ideology was exposed in a Twitter post by Hudson Institute Fellow Samuel Tadros.

“It’s remarkable to find such a guy,” Tadros told the Beacon. “Just by inviting him that tells us something about the nature of the conference and those organizing it.”

In addition, Eric Trager, a Washington Institute on Near East Policy fellow who specializes in Egyptian politics and the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote that it also was odd to see the only Coptic speaker on the program be someone opposed to Morsi’s ouster. This “suggests [the conference’s] goal is advocacy, not analysis,” he wrote.

Egyptian Copts overwhelmingly supported Morsi’s removal after he sought to entrench Islamist political power and failed to protect minority rights. The Christian minority has been targeted for a barrage of attacks by Islamists since the government was toppled.

Dalia Mogahed, a former White House advisor and protégé of the Georgetown center’s director John Esposito, wrote that Jan’s invitation “had already been handled” before the Twitter attention and that he would not be attending the event. Mogahed is scheduled to speak at the event.

The decision to change the program appears to be limited to Jan’s inclusion. The rest of the speakers, the Beacon reported, are all pro-Muslim Brotherhood. That includes a senior member of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice political party and a former senior adviser to Morsi. U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who has enjoyed close relationships with American Islamist groups, is scheduled to give the keynote address.

The issue of anti-Jewish incitement and indoctrination in Islamic theology and jurisprudence was examined, unfettered, in seminal academic publications by Western scholars during the end of the 19th century, through the early to mid-20th century. However, with rare exceptions, since the 1970s, if not somewhat earlier, an ever increasing censorship from major Western European, American, and Israeli academic institutions has managed to obfuscate this subject. Concomitantly, an obsessive self-flagellating Western public opinion has emerged, forged by well-funded “anti-racist” state networks in UN organizations, international policy groups, and the media. Denouncing racist bigotry exclusively in Europe, America and above all, Israel, these utopians aggressively promoted immigration and globalization as the only antidote to Judeo-Christian racism.

Yet the texts published herein present another picture, truer and less partial. Along with other doctrinal Islamic writings in the same vein concerning Christians, often referred to as mushrikun (polytheists associating a partner to Allah), Buddhists, Hindus and others, they were intentionally concealed. Bringing these texts to public awareness allegedly undermined efforts designed to promote a harmonious “global society.” Among other questions raised by Dr. Bostom’s essay, one wonders about the connections between deliberately tailored scholarship, and the pursuit of delusive policies.

But there is more to ponder on this issue. The canonical Islamic texts herein establish the theological and legal jurisdiction for over a billion Muslims spread over the planet. Most were written between the 9th and12th centuries in specific political and social contexts when illiteracy and superstition were commonplace. Nearly all of these texts record the acts and sayings of a prophet who lived at least two centuries before the authors compiled them, and whom none of the compilers ever met. These testimonies tell us about facts that no other contemporary record mentions. Moreover, it is this compendium of materials that is ruling the activities of Muslim communities in the 56 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and will determine the contemporary fate of the world’s billions of people, even those who ignore their existence and their meaning. This situation highlights the West’s failure—rejecting the application of objective, critical thought in the area of Islamic studies, which was encouraged, appropriately, for other theological systems with similar prejudices and superstitions.

Many reasons could have motivated this obstruction, but one is alluded on page 49 (note 52), which includes an extract from an October, 1957 US intelligence report on Johan von Leers. After World War II, von Leers, a leading Nazi, took refuge in Egypt where he converted to Islam. With his friend Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who had actively collaborated with Hitler, representing the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood branch, von Leers advocated “an expansion of Islam in Europe to bring about stronger unity through a common religion.” From the 1960s, throughout the following decades, this policy was unofficially promoted in Europe where former Nazis and collaborationist officials kept important functions as ministers, diplomats and civil servants. The situation was similar throughout Western Europe where former fascists and collaborationists held the same functions in governments or in international organizations, the UN, the European Community, Interpol and so on. For instance Walter Hallstein, officer of the Wehrmacht and Nazi jurist became architect of the European Community and first president of the European Commission (1958- 1967).

This New Europe of Hitler, von Leers and Hajj Amin el-Husseini has taken shape under our own eyes. It has reinforced hatred of the Jews through the Euro-Arab religion of “Palestinianism,” and seeks the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.

During his October 6, 2013 speech at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini. Mr. Netanyahu characterized el-Husseini as, “the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement in the first half of the 20th century.” The Prime Minister highlighted the ex-Muft’s role in fomenting pogroms (dating back, in fact, to the so-called “Nabi Musa” riots of 1920) during the decades between the Balfour Declaration, and the eventual creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Netanyahu’s address also focused on el-Husseini’s World War II era collaboration with the Nazis, the clear implication being that the Mufti’s murderous, Jew-hating ideology was simply another manifestation of Nazi evil, transplanted to a local “nationalistic struggle” in the Middle East. I have just published an extensive analysis (available as a downloadable pdf of 51 pp., and 120 references, embedded at the end of this blog) entitled, “A Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction, Text, and Commentary” which demonstrates that Netanyahu’s rehashing of such conventional, pseudo-academic “wisdom,” does not withstand any serious, objective scrutiny.

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine—anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Congressional record contains a statement of support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about “Turkish and Arab agitators . . . preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against . . . the Jews” of Palestine. During this same era within Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current—epitomized by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—promulgated the forcible restoration of sharia-mandated dhimm­itude for Jews via jihad. Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, that is, in 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish coworker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I. A. Abbady, “This was and will remain an Arab land . . . the Zionists will be massacred to the last man. . . . Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.”

Despite his role in fomenting the1920 pogroms against Palestinian Jews, el-Husseini was pardoned and subsequently appointed mufti of Jerusalem by the British high commissioner, in May 1921, a title he retained, following the Ottoman practice, for the remainder of his life. Throughout his public career, the mufti relied upon traditional Koranic anti-Jewish motifs to arouse the Arab street. For example, during the incitement which led to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine, he called for combating and slaughtering “the Jews.” not merely Zionists. In fact, most of the Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab revolt were Jews from the centuries-old dhimmi communities (for example, in Hebron), as opposed to recent settlers identified with the Zionist movement.

The mufti remained unrelenting in his espousal of a virulent, canonical Islamic Jew-hatred as the focal tenet of his ideology, before, during, and in the aftermath of World War II, and the creation of the State of Israel. He was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements, urging a “full struggle” against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress: “We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.” Declassified intelligence documents from 1942, 1947, 1952, and 1954 confirm the mufti’s own Caliphate desires in repeated references from con­texts as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Pakistan, and also include discus­sions of major Islamic conferences dominated by the mufti, which were attended by a broad spectrum of Muslim leaders literally representing the entire Islamic world (including Shia leaders from Iran), that is, in Karachi from February 16–19, 1952, and Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem, December 3–9, 1953. Viewed in their totality these data do not support the current standard assessment of the mufti as merely a Palestinian Arab nationalist, rife with a “transplanted” Jew-hatred.

There is another parallel negationist trend, which is widely prevalent: the claim that el-Husseini’s canonical Islamic Jew-hatred somehow represented a sui generis “Nazification” of Islam, which has “persisted” into our era. Paul Berman articulated an unabashed formulation of this broadly held thesis, proclaiming, that abetted by the Nazis, el-Husseini “monstrously,” and “infernally,” “blurred Islam and Nazism,” achieving

A victory of Himmler’s Islam…A victory for the Islam of fanaticism and hatred over its arch-rival, the Islam of generosity and civilization.

During 1938, a booklet Muhammad Sabri edited, Islam, Judentum, Bolschewismus (Islam, Jewry, Bolshevism), was published in Berlin by Junker-Duennhaupt [Dünnhaupt]. Sabri’s booklet included Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 declaration—also deemed by some as a “fatwa” (an Islamic religious ruling)—appealing to the worldwide Muslim umma. El-Husseini’s declaration was extracted and reprinted, separately, by the Nazi regime asIslam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry), and distributed to Muslim SS units in Bosnia, Croatia, and the Soviet Union.

As best as I can determine, the first complete, annotated translation of this pamphlet, directly from the German, was provided in my essay. Moreover, no scholar had ever identified, let alone comprehensively explicated, the antisemitic Islamic motifs which punctuate el-Husseini’s pronouncement, from beginning to end. Accordingly, the translation was followed by a detailed commentary which addressed this critical (and frankly, self-fulfilling) lacuna in the scholarship on el-Husseini’s Jew-hatred: identifying and analyzing its traditionalist Islamic origins.

What follows is the crux of my analysis, but to fully understand its arguments requires a careful reading of all the evidence adduced in the original essay.

With this weekend’s massacre by Muslim terrorists at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and Muslim terrorists killing about 80 Christians at a Christian church in Pakistan, most people wonder what, if anything in addition to a continuing war on terror, can be done to minimize the scourge of Islamic terror.

The answer lies with Muslims themselves. Specifically, it means that Muslim religious leaders around the world must announce that any Muslim who deliberately targets non-combatants for death goes to hell.

I arrive at this answer based on something that I have long believed about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.

I readily acknowledge that the situations are not the same. The Jews of Europe were not annihilated by Catholics in the name of Catholicism; whereas the Christians, Muslims and Jews who are massacred by Islamic terrorists are murdered by Muslims in the name of Islam.

I also readily acknowledge that many of the attacks on Pope Pius XII for his alleged inaction and even collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust are animated by individuals who hate Western religion generally or hate the Catholic Church specifically. Pius XII was not “Hitler’s Pope,” as one best-selling book on Pius XII is titled.

Moreover, Pius XII lived in Italy during World War II, in a fascist dictatorship that began as Hitler’s ally and ended up being the target of Nazi atrocities. This was not the case with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, who lived in the safety of a free country six-thousand miles away from Germany, did nothing to save the Jews of Europe, and even sent a boatload of Jewish refugees from Hitler back to Europe. Yet the critics of Pius are silent about Roosevelt.

Nevertheless, Pius could have done more to at least slow down the Holocaust. And I say this recognizing that Italy’s Catholic clergy saved many Jews, and that Pius, to his credit, had to be aware of this. What he could have and should have done was to announce that any Catholic — and any Christian for that matter — who in any way helps in the murder of innocent Jews is committing a mortal sin and will not attain salvation. In other words, he or she will go to hell.

This would have had no impact on the many Germans and other Europeans who had no belief in God or religion; but it would have had an impact on many who did.

I believe the same thing regarding Muslim terror. Muslim leaders — specifically, every imam in the world who is not a supporter of terror, the leaders of the most important Sunni institutions, such as the Al-Azhar Mosque and University in Cairo, and religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and the in Gulf states — must announce that any Muslim who participates in any deliberate attack on civilians goes to hell.

This must be announced as clearly and as repeatedly as, for example, Muslim condemnations of Israel.

Just as the promise of immediate entrance into paradise animates many Muslim terrorists, the promise of immediate hell would dissuade many Muslims from committing acts of terrorism.

As the military (with the support of secular groups that don’t want an Islamist state) battles the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Americans argue over how to react, we should look back at history to understand why we should support the military as the lesser of two evils and hope for its success. Those who know the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and see the murderous attacks it has launched on the homes, businesses, schools, and churches of Coptic Christians, who represent about 10 percent of the population, will recognize that we have seen this type of behavior before.

The Brotherhood is simply using the same tactics and ideology of the political party that it allied itself with in the 1930s and 40s: the Nazi Party. What is happening to the Coptic Christians being beaten, kidnapped, and killed all over Egypt is similar to[1] what happened to Jews in Germany during Kristallnacht[2] on November 9-10, 1938, when Jews were killed and beaten and their homes, stores, schools, and synagogues ransacked, looted, and demolished in Germany and Austria.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna, who was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler and who formed an alliance with the Nazis. The Brotherhood helped distribute translated copies of Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is eerily similar to Nazi fascism, including its ultimate objective of world conquest and a new caliphate. The only difference is it believes in the supremacy of Islam instead of the supremacy of the Aryan race.

The Nazis even helped fund the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 against the Jews and British in Palestine, which was led by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was al-Husseini who met with Hitler in 1941[3] and helped augment the traditional Arab hatred of Jews with plans for a genocidal campaign against Jews.

The fascist origins of the Muslim Brotherhood are fully ingrained in everything it does. Its hatred for Jews has migrated into a hatred of all non-Muslims, particularly Christian Arabs. In the Muslim Brotherhood’s eyes, Coptic Egyptians are traitors to their race and the only true religion, Islam. Many Americans refuse to understand that jihadists like the Brotherhood do not accept any separation between church and state — the only acceptable government is a Muslim theocratic state based on Sharia law.

There is another parallel to Nazi Germany in the situation in Egypt that Americans should also keep in mind. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in the 1932 elections just like Mohamed Morsi was in 2012. Hitler then set out to destroy Germany’s democracy[4] and make himself and the Nazi Party its supreme ruler. Morsi has spent the past year taking the same type of steps, slowly throttling his opposition and media critics, and working to make his formally banned fascist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, sovereign over all of Egypt.

Just like Hitler and the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood wants full dictatorial control of the country and the elimination of Jews, Christians, and all non-Muslims. There is no question that if they can gain control of the military, they will do everything possible to prepare for and launch a war to destroy Israel. That is a fundamental tenet of their ideology.

Many forget that Hitler had a very uneasy relationship initially with the German military. It was the only viable force in Germany that could have deposed Hitler and the Nazis as they started to consolidate power. But the military never did so and Hitler acted quickly to take control of the military to prevent any such opposition from developing. It was only late in the war in 1944 that a small number of senior military officers finally tried to assassinate Hitler to get rid of him and end the war.

But what if the German military had acted much earlier? Hitler in essence consolidated his power[5] in the two years from 1932 to 1934 through a complicated series of actions, including plots like the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives, and the passage of various laws that effectively swept away all of his opposition. If the German military had crushed Hitler, his SA Brownshirts, the Hitler Youth, the SS, and all of the other Nazi Party affiliates in 1933, perhaps millions of people would not have died in a genocidal war and Nazi concentration camps. The history of Europe might have been completely different.

Fortunately, the Egyptian military has acted before Morsi and his own Muslim Brotherhood Brownshirts had the full opportunity to consolidate their power. Morsi and his clan are thugs with views no different than those who stood in the docks at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. If we can learn anything from the history of the 1930s and Nazi Germany, we should be hoping that the Egyptian military is successful in crushing the new version of the Nazis in the Middle East. That is the only way that a real democracy will ever have a chance to be born in Egypt.

This time, Hollywood collaborates with Islamists

Author Ben Urwand has ignited a controversy with his claim that Hollywood effectively collaborated with Hitler’s Nazi regime in the late 1930s to expunge any material that might depict Germany and the Fuehrer damagingly. Fearing a loss of an important revenue stream, Jewish film moguls like Louis B. Mayer (MGM) and Darryl Zanuck (20th Century Fox) cut scenes, ran scripts by Nazi censors for approval and abandoned promising film projects in an attempt to placate Berlin. While Brandeis professor Thomas Doherty challenges this characterization of Hollywood’s behavior (especially the use of words like “collaboration” and “pact” in the book’s title), Urwand backs up his assertions with compelling documentation.

Fast forward to the 21st century where violent Islamists have, by one estimate, perpetrated over 21,000 deadly terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. And while the studio system may be gone, it is undeniable that once again Hollywood is largely afraid of depicting totalitarians as the “bad guys.” As Daniel Pipes has chronicled, Hollywood avoids Muslim antagonists like the plague, transforming, for example, the Arab terrorists in Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, into neo-Nazis in the filmic version. Meanwhile, Zero Dark Thirty, the Oscar-nominated 2012 movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was savaged by critics, politicians and Hollywood elites alike for purportedly whitewashing the tough choices sometimes made by those engaged in the war against Islamist terror.

Hollywood Producer Howard Gordon (L) with the executive director of the Islamist group Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Salam al-Marayati, at an MPAC Hollywood Bureau event.

Although the first generation Jewish immigrants who built Hollywood are long gone, their co-religionist descendents still wield sizable influence in the film industry and are following in their cowardly footsteps. The much touted Homeland TV series, produced by Howard Gordon, pushes a moral equivalence between the actions of its American POW-turned-Muslim terrorist hero and the vice president who ordered a bombing campaign that took the lives of innocent Iraqis. Munich, written by the vocally anti-Israel Tony Kushner, directed by Steven Spielberg and distributed by Dreamworks (founded by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen) and Universal (headed by Ron Meyer) equated Israeli counter-terrorists with the Palestinian murderers they were tasked with assassinating. Nary a Muslim terrorist is in sight in recent Hollywood offerings; instead audiences are treated to a proliferation of anti-U.S. films set in the Mideast (In the Valley of Elah, Green Zone, Rendition) — all of which have happily tanked at the box office.

The parallels are obvious but worth highlighting. Once again the film industry, afraid of offending a lucrative market (Muslims), pulls back from tackling the genocidal danger staring it in the face, this time seeking the approval of Islamist groups like MPAC and CAIR. Once again, Jews are in the forefront of kowtowing to those who, under the right circumstances, would likely seek their elimination. The only difference this time is that Hollywood’s reprehensible behavior is equally prompted by rampant political correctness and a well-earned fear of violent Islamists (just go ask the late Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh).

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film industry did get behind the war against fascism foursquare, producing such classic—and top-grossing—movies as Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver and To Have and Have Not. Although the devastating jihadist attack of 9/11 may be a decade behind us, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is still fresh in the minds of most Americans, who have a clear idea of the nature of the enemy. It is long past time for Hollywood to shake off its p.c. blinders, its timidity, and its fear of the “Islamophobia” grievance industry and make the films that Americans crave.

Actor Mark Wahlberg takes on the lead role as Luttrell, who found himself stranded and surrounded by enemy forces after they ambushed his team in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan:

Mark Wahlberg in “Lone Survivor”(YouTube/Moviefone)

The other men of SEAL Team 10 who lost their lives fighting in Operation Red Wings were Mike Murphy (played by Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (played by Emile Hirsch), and Matt Axelson (played by Ben Foster).

The trailer also features Alexander Ludwig as Petty Officer Shane Patton, somberly reciting “Ballad of the Frogmen” as the SEAL teams trained for their missions.

“Lone Survivor” hits theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on December 27, 2013, and the rest of the U.S. on January 10, 2014.

“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty –
Come and join the Nazi Party.”
– Mel Brooks, “Springtime for Hitler”

What to do? Late last Sunday night, a 23-year-old woman in Oscarshamn, a town of 17,000 people that’s about halfway between Mecca and Medina – sorry, I mean Stockholm and Malmö – was on her way home when she was stopped by three young men of foreign origin. “Are you Swedish?” they asked her. When she said yes, they hit her so hard that she fell to the ground. Then, looking down at her, lying there at their feet, they said: “Welcome to Sweden. It’s our country now, not yours.”

The brief account I read of this incident closes with the information that the police have labeled this a “hate crime.” Gee, ya think? Presumably there’s no place on their checklists for “soft jihad.” (Although I’m sure there was nothing soft about the punch that knocked that young woman to the pavement.)

One thing these “soft” jihadists have going for them is that what they’re engaged in is, quite simply, so audacious that – unless you’re prepared to open your mind up to the immense and terrible reality of it – it can seem almost farcical. “It’s our country now, not yours”? It has the absurd ring of a pathetic claim made by some schoolyard punk. Except that those three punks in Oscarshamn aren’t alone. They’re certainly far from the first of their kind in Europe to make such an arrogant pronouncement. And as the years go by, that bold assertion, echoed increasingly in the streets of a growing number of European towns and cities, comes ever closer to being the plain and simple truth.

It may be that that 23-year-old woman would’ve known better than to walk home alone late at night if she were living in certain parts of Stockholm or Malmö, but that she assumed it was still safe in Oscarshamn. Perhaps she figured: well, it won’t be safe here in five or ten years, but for now…?

This is the current European calculus. I’m reminded of a gay guy I met in a West Hollywood bar one night in the mid 1980s. He had, he told me, recently moved to L.A. from New York. “Why?” I asked. I was stunned by the fatuity, the deadly self-deception, of his reply. He had left New York, he said, to get away from AIDS: “It’s not so bad here yet.”

I’m also brought to mind of the Australian writer Nevil Shute’s haunting 1957 novel On the Beach, which became a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Fallout from a nuclear war has killed almost everybody on earth, leaving alive just a few million people in the southern hemisphere – in Australia, New Zealand, and at the southern tips of South America and Africa – who can do nothing but wait for the air currents to do the inevitable job of bringing the radiation their way, too. Over the course of the novel, one by one, from north to south, the cities of Australia die out. The film is splendid, but the novel paints an even more haunting portrait of the human race helplessly facing its own extinction.

Of course, the difference between Shute’s characters and real-life Europeans today is that the latter aren’thelpless. They could act. But they feel helpless. They hear the cry ring out, in one place after another: “It’s our country, not yours.” And how do they respond?

Last week three news stories neatly summed up the ways in which all too many Europeans areresponding. From Brussels came the report that the European Parliament is expected to act in a few days to lift the immunity from prosecution that Marine Le Pen enjoys as a member of that body. Why? So that she may be put on trial for criticizing Islam. A British Tory member of the European Parliament, Sajjad Karim, spoke out in favor of the measure, explaining that there’s “a red line between freedom of speech and inciting racial hatred.”

What exactly did Le Pen, head of the French National Front, say to bring on this effort? In a December 2010 speech, she observed that the sight of masses of Muslims spontaneously taking over streets and blocking traffic in order to pray together – a spectacle that is increasingly familiar in Paris and other French cities, and that is destined to become an everyday event in other European cities before very long – recalled the Nazi occupation of France. “There are no armoured vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it weighs on people,” Le Pen declared. It is for this bit of truth-telling that she now faces the prospect of a trial.

That’s one way, then, to respond to the jihadists’ victory cry – to haul their opponents into court. Another approach is to keep the critics of jihad from entering your country in the first place. On Friday the BBC reported that British officials – who for years have refused to deport any number of high-profile advocates of Islamic terrorism, and on multiple occasions have allowed the most atrocious of foreign-based jihad apologists (such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi) to sully their shores – were appalled at the news that Islam critics Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer planned to come to Britain to speak at a June 29 event in memory of jihad victim Drummer Lee Rigby. Home Secretary Theresa May, the BBC noted, was considering denying Geller and Spencer entry into the U.K.; Home Affairs Committee Chairman Keith Vaz, describing them as “incendiary speakers,” made the usual fraudulent, fainthearted noises about the “incitement of hatred.”

There is a long history of Western powers believing that they could manipulate or work with radical Arabic-speaking states or movements to redo the regional order. All have ended badly.

– During the 1880s and 1890s, Germany became convinced that it could turn the forces of jihad against British, French, and Russian rivals. The kaiser presented himself as the Muslim world’s friend, and German propaganda even hinted that their ruler had converted to Islam.

– In World War One, the Germans launched a jihad, complete with the Ottoman caliph’s proclamation. Wiser heads warned that the Ottoman ruler didn’t have real authority to do so, or that the raising of the jihad spirit could cause massacres of Christians in the empire. They were ignored.

As a result, few responded to this jihad; Armenians were massacred, at times with at least the passive complicity of the German government.

– Nevertheless, Adolf Hitler, whose close comrades included many veterans of the earlier jihad strategy, tried the same approach in World War Two. This time, the Jews in the Middle East were to be the massacred scapegoats. Yet despite close collaboration by the leader of the Palestine Arabs Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood, among others, the defeat of the German armies along with other factors (incompetence, unkept Arab promises, and German priorities) prevented this alliance from succeeding.

By the way: the Nazi collaborators were the same Muslim Brotherhood to which the United States is allied today. There are huge amounts of archival evidence, including documents showing not only Nazi payments to the Brotherhood but also that the Nazis provided them with arms for a rebellion to kill Christians and Jews in Egypt.

There is no evidence that the Brotherhood has changed its positions. The story above is told in a new book I wrote with the brilliant scholar Wolfgang G. Schwanitz — Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East – which will be published by Yale University Press in January 2014. It will be an explosive rethinking of Middle Eastern history which could not be more timely.

Incidentally, might one think that the Western mass media should mention that the chief U.S. ally in the Arab world — one of whose branches is now receiving American weapons — were Nazi collaborators who have never abandoned their anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish views? How much has the Brotherhood visibly reconsidered its ideology since the man who is still its leader, Muhammad al-Badi, explained in October 2010 that the Egyptian regime would be overthrown and then the Brotherhood would wage jihad on a weak and retreating America?

The presence of Muslims in the West is not a recent phenomenon; on the contrary, it reaches back many decades, to Nazi Germany. Then, a group of former Soviet Muslims, seeking better treatment in Germany, defected and aided the Nazi effort. Muslim Brotherhood (MB) cohorts in the Middle East conducted a parallel effort. Later, under the control of U.S. intelligence, many of these same Muslims were harnessed as a bulwark against worldwide Communist domination during the Cold War. Eventually completely taken over by the MB, these German Muslim cohorts were courted by the West as a most curious partner to counter Islamic extremism. The locus for much of their activity, which they later used to spread Islam throughout Europe and plan major terrorist attacks in the West, including 9/11, was to become a beachhead in Europe — the Munich mosque.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson details this history in his book, A Mosque in Munich. Johnson examines nearly 80 years of the Muslim presence in Europe and how America helped strengthen the very community dedicated to the destruction of the West. Most of it is on target, except for Johnson’s crucial underplaying of the Muslim Brotherhood’s key role in the mission to destroy America.

Muslims Fighting for Nazism

During World War II, the Nazis saw an opportunity to use disenfranchised non-Russian Muslim minorities to fight the Soviet Union. As victims of Soviet repression, Muslims were treated as an underclass. Their farms were collectivized, their assets were confiscated, they were persecuted for practicing their religion, and their mosques were shuttered. Thus, they became ripe for Nazi exploitation, and, as devalued soldiers, non-Russian Muslim minorities were eager to be captured by the Germans and fight against Stalin. In addition, since anti-Semitism was an intrinsic part of their religious doctrine, these Muslims naturally allied with Nazis efforts to exterminate Jews.

Johnson recounts that by the 1930s, another force in the Islamic world, the MB, founded in 1928, was accepting money from the Nazis and using it to establish a military wing. The nascent organization run by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, focused on anti-British colonialism and opposition to Jewish immigration. In 1933, al-Husseini contacted the Nazis about supplying recruits for the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi party, and joining a collaborative effort to eliminate Jewish influence in economics and politics.

Seduced by the oil-rich Caucasus inhabited by the Muslim minorities, Hitler realized the potential of being viewed as a liberator of this oppressed region. When the Wehrmacht seized the North Caucasus in 1942, the Germans announced to cheers that the mosques would be reopened and the SS began actively courting émigré leaders in the region in an effort to employ Islam as a motivating force to assist their fighting units.

Using Islam to Fight Communism

Just as the Nazis had used Muslims for their own ends, the U.S. government acted similarly, as Johnson recounts in A Mosque in Munich, which traces the United States’ burgeoning interest in using Islam as an anti-communist tool. As early as 1951, at the end of Harry Truman’s second term in office, U.S. intelligence agencies considered using Islam to shore up the free world in the fight against Soviet Cold War influence and essentially split the Soviet Union by pitting non-Russians against Russians. At first, the United States concentrated on working with ex-Nazi, non-Russian Muslim émigrés as part of a CIA-funded broadcast organization, Radio Liberty, headquartered in Germany and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. At the time, U.S. Cold War policy focused on “containment,” or preventing the spread of Communism. Eventually, U.S. Cold War efforts became more aggressive, and the goal shifted to overturning communism altogether by various covert operations, economic warfare, sabotage, and propaganda.

Janet Levy, MBA, MSW, is an activist, world traveler, and freelance journalist who has contributed to American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Full Disclosure Network, FrontPage Magazine, Family Security Matters and other publications. She blogs at www.womenagainstshariah.com

During World War II, in an effort to combat Nazi totalitariansm, men and women of good will in France formed a resistance movement against the Nazis. They came to be known as the Resistance fighters who bravely fought against the tide of the Nazi invasion. Today, once again there is a new growth of totalitarian supremacist ideology in the name of Islam and it is presently receiving protective status under the guise of religion; yet, today its legitamacy is derived on our own soil. The definition of “Islam” is submission and while we may state that we are not at war with Islam, Islam has declared war on us.

Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was the instrumental book that incited Germans to wage war against the Jews and incited millions in surrounding countries to submit to its supremacist totalitarian quest for world domination. Not unlike Mein Kampf, we now have on American soil an Islamic doctrine (Quran) that commands its practioners to wage war against all non-believers until Islam reigns supreme. “Slay the pagans(Christians) wherever ye find them and seize them, confine them, and lie in wait for them in every place of ambush” (Surah 9:5) and “So fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief) and all submit to the religion of Allah alone (in the whole world).” (Quran: 8:39) These are just a few of the many passages littered throughout Quranic doctrine with the call for Jihad. Unlike Judeo/Christian doctrine, the violence in Quranic doctrine is instructional violence without a specific time frame. Those of us in today’s Resistance Coalition have been referred to as Islamophobics, bigots, racists, and hatemongers, but in an upside down world it is we who are combatting the hate spewed by a doctrine that places all non-believers in what is referred to in Islam as Dar Al Harb (the House of War). Yes, the Quran segrated the world into Dar Al Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar Al Harb, reserved for all non-Muslims.

For the first time in American history we are providing a sanctuary to a doctrine that seeks our demise. The Quran which commands each Muslim to slay the unbelievers wherever they may find them is housed in every mosque. There are now over 2000 mosques funded by Saudi Arabian oil money throughout the United States. The colonization by the Umma (prosletyzation) is encouraged and financed by oil money and it matters not one iota that not all Muslims are Jihadists. It is a threat and affront to our existence and liberty that we give sanctuary to a dangerous doctrine that calls for our submission at best and slaughter at worst.

Shari Goodman is an educator and a chapter leader for ACT! For America. Her views are her own and are not necessarily representative of ACT! For America. Her columns have appeared in Family Security Matters, Israel Today, and the Los Angeles Times.

With the nations of Europe and the rest of the world lining up to support the PLO bid to receive non-member state status at the UN General Assembly, it is worth noting two anniversaries of related but forgotten events.

Of course, everyone knows the obvious anniversary – Nov. 29, 1947 was the day the UN General Assembly passed the plan to recommend the partition the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs — both local and regional – rejected it. The local Arabs who 25 years later became known as “Palestinians,” responded to the passage of UNGA resolution 181 by launching a terror war against the Jews. Their war was commanded by Iraqi and Lebanese terror masters and supported by the British military and its Arab Legion from Transjordan.

On May 15, 1948 five foreign Arab armies invaded the just-declared Jewish state with the declared aim of annihilating all the Jews.

Now for a couple less known anniversaries

On November 28, 1941 the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs and one of the most influential leaders of the Arab world Haj Amin el Husseini met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Husseini had courted the Nazis since just after the Nazis rose to power in 1933. Husseini was forced to flee the British Mandate in 1937 when he expanded his fourth terror war against the Jews, that he began in 1936 to include the British as well.

He fled to Lebanon, and then in October 1939 he fled to Iraq. In April 1941 he fomented a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. As the British — with massive unheralded assistance from the Jews from the land of Israel — were poised to enter Baghdad and restore the pro-British government, Husseini incited the Farhud, a 3-day pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad that took place over the festival of Shavuot. 150 Jews were murdered. A thousand were wounded and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.

With the coup defeated and the Jews murdered, Husseini escaped to then pro-Nazi Iran and then in October to Germany by way of Italy. (He was flown out of Iran on an Italian Air Force plane, and feted by Mussolini when he landed in Rome).

He arrived in Berlin and two and a half weeks later he had a prolonged private meeting with Hitler. There, on November 28, 1941, two months before the Wannssee Conference, where the German high command received its first orders to annihilate European Jewry, Hitler told Husseini that he intended to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of Europe.

Husseini remained in Berlin through the end of the war and served as a Nazi agent. In Berlin he broadcast daily diatribes to the Arab world on German shortwave radio in Arabic. Specifically Husseini exhorted them to kill the Jews in the name of Allah and make common cause with the Nazis who would deliver them from the Jews, the British and the Americans.

In 1943 Husseini organized the Hazhar SS Division of Bosnian Muslims. His division carried out the massacre of 90 percent of the Bosnian Jewish community of 12,000.

In 1920 Husseini personally invented what later became known as the Palestinian national movement. He shaped its identity around the sole cause of destroying the Jewish presence in the land of Israel.

During the war Husseini used his broadcasts to shape the political and religious consciousness of the Muslim world by fusing Islamic Jew hatred with annihilationist Nazi anti-Semitism. Whereas much of the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology was discredited in postwar Europe, it has remained the single most resonant theme of Arab politics since World War II.

In 1946, as his fellow Nazi war criminals were being tried in Nuremberg, Husseini made a triumphant return to Egypt where he was welcomed as a war hero by King Farouk, the Muslim Brotherhood and the young officers in the Egyptian army who fused Nazi national socialism with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and took over Egypt after deposing Farouk in 1951.

The founder of Palestinian nationalism’s singleminded dedication to the genocide of Jewry brings us to the second notable but forgotten anniversary we passed over this month.

On Nov. 12 1942 the British led forces — with the massive and unreported support of Jewish commando and engineering units from the land of Israel — defeated Germany’s Afrika Corps led by Gen. Rommel in the second Battle of Alamein. With the German defeat, the specter of a German occupation of the Middle East was removed. Husseini and Himmler had planned that under German occupation, the Arabs would expand the Holocaust to the 800,000 Jews of the Arab world and the 450,000 Jews in the land of Israel. To this end, the Germans had organized the Einzatzgruppen Afrika unit attached to Rommel’s army. Under the command of SS LTC Walter Rauff, it was tasked with murdering Jews located in the areas that were to come under German occupation.

It is fitting that yesterday, on the anniversary of Hitler’s meeting with Husseini, Germany announced that it would not oppose Husseini’s heirs’ bid to receive UN recognition of a Palestinian state that seeks Israel’s destruction.

After escaping Iraq ahead of pursuing British security forces and making his way to fascist Italy, Amin al-Husseini arrived in Germany in November 1941. Upon reaching Berlin, al-Husseini was treated as visiting royalty; a head of state in exile. The Nazi Party supplied him with several luxurious homes staffed with servants, a chauffeured Mercedes limousine, a monthly stipend equivalent to $10,000, and suites in two of Berlin’s most-prestigious hotels. He was also allocated a generous entertainment allowance, intended for his use in influencing the substantial Arab expatriate community then in Berlin.

Seeking support for Arab pan-nationalism and Muslim causes, al-Husseini had been in contact with members of the Nazi regime as early as 1933. He presented the Nazi leadership with a draft proposal of German-Arab cooperation, under which Germany would recognize the legitimacy of an Arab state encompassing Palestine, Syria, Trans-Jordan and Iraq, in return for Arab support of the Axis Powers in the Middle East. These views found favor in the highest reaches of the Nazi Party. On November 28, 1941, after meeting with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, al-Husseini was granted an audience with Führer Adolf Hitler.

In Hitler, al-Husseini found a soul mate. Although Hitler had written years before in Mein Kampf of the “racial inferiority” of Muslims, the Führer’s views had modified considerably since that time. Indeed, in the blond-haired, blue-eyed and light-complexioned al-Husseini, Hitler found a fellow Aryan. The Mufti and he shared a passionate hatred of the Jews and the British. Thus united, they formed a new strategic partnership.

In the months following his successful meeting with Hitler, al-Husseini formed a number of close relationships with members of the Nazi inner circle, including friendships with Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), Hitler’s elite body guard and the chief paramilitary force of the Reich; and SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann. The Grand Mufti remained close with Reichsminister von Ribbentrop. Soon, al-Husseini and these men discovered a shared passion for the extermination of Jews.

At al-Husseini’s request, Von Ribbentrop ordered that no Jews within German-controlled territory be allowed to leave Europe to enter Palestine. He also directed the formation of a special bureau within the Foreign Ministry devoted to extermination of Jewry abroad, called the “Anti-Jewish Action Abroad.”

With the assistance of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, al-Husseini began pro-Axis Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Berlin to the Middle East as early as December, 1941. In these broadcasts, he called upon his Arab brethren to commit acts of sabotage against the British and to kill Jews and other infidels at every opportunity. Assisted by Iraqi fellow exile Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, the Mufti called upon Muslims worldwide to wage jihad against the Allies. In one such broadcast on March 1, 1944, al-Husseini urged his listeners, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.”

The Grand Mufti collaborated actively with Himmler and Eichmann in the conduct of the “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He toured Auschwitz concentration camp with Eichmann, and according to later testimony at the Nuremburg Trials by top Eichmann aide and SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, al-Husseini constantly urged greater haste in the killing of the Jews.

In 1943, Himmler asked for al-Husseini’s assistance in recruiting Muslims into the SS for use in the Balkans; under the Mufti’s enthusiastic direction, the notorious 13th Mountain Division “Handschar” of the Waffen-SS was formed from some 20,000 Croatian Muslim volunteers. It later saw action against Yugoslav partisans under Marshall Tito, and participated in ethnic cleansing operations against Jews and other “undesirables” in the region. Over 800,000 Yugoslav Serbs, Jews and Roma (gypsies) were exterminated, many by the cruel members of the Handschar division.

In the next installment of this series, we will examine the life of Muslim Brotherhood commentator and theorist Sayyid Qutb.

Peter Farmer is a historian and commentator on national security, geopolitics and public policy issues. He has done original research on wartime resistance movements in WWII Europe, and has delivered seminars on such subjects as political violence and terrorism, the evolution of conflict, combat medicine, and related subjects. Mr. Farmer is also a scientist and a medic.